Saturday, December 26, 2015

"In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears"

You can generally place a person on the socio-economic continuum based on the amount of stuff they carry.
A homeless bag lady carries everything she's got. Prince Charles, who has four homes, doesn't even carry cash.

Of course there are exceptions. If I go down to the lobby, sometimes the young office girls might be carrying three handbags, even though they are working/lower-middle class, they end up with a lot of stuff they need access to throughout the day and are actual bag ladies.

Poor people carry cash, rich people do not. As Vonnegut said it Slaughterhouse Five: "And so it goes".
Now the poor can be more like Prince Charles.

Even the Abba
Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote
“Money, Money, Money,” considers cash so last-century that it does not
accept bills and coins

Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.

This
tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and
the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the
innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical
matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense
cash.

At the Abba
Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash
is dying out,” said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has
leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including
the museum.

Not
everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has
alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat
to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes.
Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more
than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry of
Justice.

Older
adults and refugees in Sweden who use cash may be marginalized, critics
say. And young people who use apps to pay for everything or take out
loans via their mobile phones risk falling into debt.

“It
might be trendy,” said Bjorn Eriksson, a former director of the Swedish
police force and former president of Interpol. “But there are all sorts
of risks when a society starts to go cashless.”

But
advocates like Mr. Ulvaeus cite personal safety as a reason that
countries should go cash-free. He switched to using only card and
electronic payments after his son’s Stockholm apartment was burglarized
twice several years ago.

“There
was such a feeling of insecurity,” said Mr. Ulvaeus, who carries no
cash at all. “It made me think: What would happen if this was a cashless
society, and the robbers couldn’t sell what they stole?”

Bills and coins now represent
just 2 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7 percent in the
United States and 10 percent in the euro area. This year, only a fifth
of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared with
an average of 75 percent in the rest of the world, according to
Euromonitor International.

Cards are still king in Sweden — with nearly 2.4 billion credit and debit transactions in 2013,
compared with 213 million 15 years earlier. But even plastic is facing
competition, as a rising number of Swedes use apps for everyday
commerce....MORE